US withdraws Mideast resolution at UN. Basically because Israel doesn't want to be bound by any UN resolution, and the US is not behaving as a peace broker by acting in compliance with Israel's interests first. Oh, and don't tell me they are concerned by the Palestinians because the Palestinians didn't read the resolution, as the article suggests. That's ridiculous because nobody speaks for the Palestinians at this conference.
Last Saturday, we went to see 'Redacted' at the theater. My husband and I have been expecting the movie since it made headlines and controversy after the Venice film festival. We dragged our reluctant nearly 18 year old with us. 'This is your chance to see how our governments treat, or mistreat, the Truth', we told him. He complied.
'Redacted' is the story of the rape and the killing of a 15 year old Iraqi girl and her family by two US soldiers stationed in Iraq. The story "is based on the gang rape, murder and burning of 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, by US soldiers in March 2006. The soldiers also killed her parents and younger sister. Redacted means edited or revised to make suitable for publication - De Palma's point is that the authorities have not allowed us to see what we have done to the people of Iraq. Access has been limited, images have been censored, and the few that have been seen have often contradicted the official version of events. De Palma was determined to tell a story that showed the full horror of the Iraq war."
It is constructed from real material; videos and video surveillance cameras inside military camps, blogs, soldiers' testimonies, TV footage, unavailable to the public through mainstream media. The story is set in the larger context of the war in Iraq and De Palma shows us the reality of life in and around a US checkpoint, where many Iraqi civilians were killed. The movie could have been a documentary except that, De Palma, for legal reasons, wasn't able to use the real material and he had to fictionalise the story relying on actors and a carefully scripted scenario. This is a very convoluted, labyrinthic, way to reality. The reality of the Iraq war is heavily redacted on our screens and in our newspapers, and De Plama restores to us this reality through fiction. He also uses video footage as to give the impression of a documentary.
The docu-movie starts with scenes of the soldiers shot by one of their own, Angel Salazar, who intends to use the material from his videos to get into film school after his service. The docu-movie then moves to the checkpoint and what goes around. These are precious scenes. We hear a lot about checkpoints but how many of us know actually what is really a US checkpoint in Iraq ? De Palma uses an intermediary to explain a checkpoint, a real-fake French documentary in which the slow voice and the images are very didactic. We watch the boredom and the anxiety of US soldiers who guard the checkpoint and we follow the itinerary of ordinary Iraqis driving through the checkpoint. We also watch a sample of what actually can happen at a checkpoint, suicide bombing, and civilian killings as they rush to the hospital. The whole thing is a mess. And the only question that emerges from this is : 'Why on earth, an army of occupation does need checkpoints ? They are not in Iraq to fight a civil war. usually you need a checkpoint to separate communities, not to occupy a country'. It was my husband's question at the end, and I must admit for the person who I am, who lived and survived a civil war in Lebanon, that my husband's question was very relevant. Checkpoints aren't of any use in Iraq, they don't fit the official US narrative of this war and we don't know actually what purpose they serve. They incite defiance and provoke tragic misunderstandings and lost translations, like when a car rushes to transport a pregant woman to the hospital and they signal it to the soldiers, but in the middle of culturally different gestures and signs the message is lost on both sides and the pregnant woman is killed. Checkpoints are also a useful target for suicide bombers.
At checkpoints we see male soldiers strip search Iraqi schoolgirls by running their hands on their bodies. This is yet another attempt at humiliating Iraqis. I live and travel in western countries and this kind of serach on women in western countries is performed by female security agents. Why should we submit Iraqi girls to this humiliation ? If the US really wanted to win hearts and minds in Iraq then it would at least pay attention to such details. Because it is during one of these repetitive routines that a porn obsessed soldier got to land his envy on an Iraqi schoolgirl whom he is going to rape and assasinate with her whole family later on.
We also see an embedded journalist at work during a night raid to search for insurgents in an Iraqi house, void of insurgents and weapons. We see US soldiers seize documents in Arabic, even though they don't understand a word. They will check them with the translator later they say, but before that they have to determine, without the translator, what is suspicious and incriminating evidence in a language they don't understand. The house searched is that of the girl who would be raped later, but not before her father was arrested and put in prison.
We see how the Iraqi insurgency operates, with caméra fitted computers and surveillance of US soldiers' posts and checkpoints. It is after a bomb explodes and kills the officer of the group that the raid on the house is conducted as a retaliation.
We also got to see and hear from the soldiers as they are interacting and discussing their job or as they are communicating with their families. Beside salazar, who seems detached, as if outside the conflict, only preoccupied with his videos, two of the five main characters have no illusion whatsoever about their mission, they want to serve their time and go back to their families. While the two others, those who raped the girl and killed her family are clearly your type of gang street criminal and psychotic perverse killer, in real life and on duty. They are racists, they call Iraqis 'sandniggers', they don't consider them as humans. The entire story is built on the tension that will accumulate throughout the docu-movie between the soldiers. Eventually, Soldier McCoy, who was becoming upset with what he witnessed from his comrades, will denounce them to the military police. It takes some courage to do it as we see that the army is not pleased to hear or to be forced to investigate such matters.
Most of the events presented to us by De Palma are recorded by soldier Salazar, even the rape of the shoolgirl and the killing of her family. Salazar will be the one who will pay for the rape of the Iraqi girl and the killing of her family. We watch his beheading by the insurgency on a webvideo nearly unredacted.
After we watched the movie I surprised myself asking loudly the question to the people around me: 'What the hell the US is doing in Iraq ?'. If there is one thing this docu-movie shows, it is both the savagery unleashed by this war on both sides, and the moral dilemma that is absent from the official rendition of this war in our society and our government compliant media.
Contrary to O'reilly, who declared on Fox News a mini-war on the film producers for putting US soldiers' lives in danger, it is the US government who is putting US soldiers' lives and souls in danger for no clear objective. Most soldiers aren't stupid, they clearly show great uneasiness about the fogginess of the purpose of their mission in Iraq and it is this, with the physical danger and the stress of extended duties that is killing them. I even thought that De Palma was being sympathetic to the soldiers. You have some great Characters portrayed through the story. Mc Coy is definitely De Palma's inner voice and conscience.
De Palma is an angry man and he is right about his anger and he is right to express it in such a smart way and to communicate it to us and make us feel how it feels like to be a US soldier in Iraq. De Palma's docu-movie will make history. It will be the reference movie on Iraq, years from now.
Any blogger reading this account and agreeing with it is asked to put one of the two promotional videos of 'Redacted' on his blog, for the sake of Truth. The movie website redactedmovie.com has a toolkit for bloggers. The movie is also a homage to the blogosphere for its role in digging the truth.
Annapolis is a very crowded conference and I wonder why it needed to be crowded. It looks like Bush, Rice, and Cheney are trying to build yet another coalition.
"To recap, Amis was called a racist because he said Muslims were backward, violent, homophobic, paranoid, boring, retarded and stupid. Hitchens said no, he's conducting a 'thought experiment'."
My brother was asking me on the phone five minutes ago: 'who are we in Lebanon and what do we represent for major foreign powers and political brokers who have visited us from five continents repeatedly the last four weeks in an attempt to reach a consensus between the Lebanese nonmajority that is Sanyura's government and the majority opposition that are Aoun-Amal-Hezbollah ?'
I don't have the answer. The only thing I know is that it has been like this in Lebanon since the fall of the ottoman empire; foreign powers set the political agenda. The other thing I know is that Lebanese have been always divided between pro-western and pan-Arab sympathies. And the last thing I know is that Politicians in lebanon have always opened the door wide to foreign intervention.
I think that in no way the US is ready for a large scale confrontation that may result from a new lebanese civil war now in the ME. But they have set Iraq as an example of what they are capable of and they are trying to capitalise on the Iraqi tragedy to instill fear. Because if they are really ready for another confrontation, with the Iraqi disaster going on, it will be the end of US foreign policy in the ME. And I think if they are really willing to go for a large scale confrontation, they shouldn't have bothered offering some carrots to Syria, like inviting it to the Annapolis conference, in order to isolate Syria from Hezbollah and Iran. Aoun and Hezbollah shouldn't be bothered, no matter the outcome in terms of Lebanese presidentiel elections, time is playing on their side.
"Bogus flyers from a fake organisation called the Islamic Australia Federation were distributed through the letterboxes of voters in a marginal seat, claiming the Labor opposition sympathised with Islamic terrorists. ...A team of Labor officials found five men posting the clumsily printed flyers - the phrase Allah Akbar, God is Great, had been misspelled as Ala Akba - through letterboxes in the early hours of the morning."
Lesson: In order not to be caught playing dirty tricks to one's political opponents now, one must know how to spell 'Allah Akbar'.
The last legal casus belli for the US going to war against Iran just doesn't work. Now they will have to invent the Uranium story from Nigeria, hopefully there won't be a CIA officer and her husband diplomat on their back so they can get away with their lies. Oh and also it was repeated time and again that US allies in the ME are authoritarian regimes, and that submissiveness to the US of leaders in these countries, as well as their handling of their political opponents with the last trend in the west now, torture and unlawful imprisonement, are breeding extremism in their populations. But no sensible person in the US would look at this phenomenon. It is as if the US were determined to breed both submissiveness and terrorism in the ME, and ban moderation and common ground.
"Around 60% of all foreign militants who entered Iraq to fight over the past year came from Saudi Arabia and Libya, according to files seized by American forces at a desert camp.
The files listed the nationalities and biographical details of more than 700 fighters who crossed into Iraq from August last year, around half of whom came to the country to be suicide bombers, the New York Times reported today.
In all, 305, or 41%, of the fighters listed were from Saudi Arabia. Another 137, or 18%, came from Libya. Both countries are officially US allies in anti-terrorism efforts.
In contrast, 56 Syrians were listed and no Lebanese. Previously, US officials estimated that around a fifth of all foreign fighters in Iraq came from these two countries.
US officials have also long complained about Iranian interference in the affairs of its neighbour, accusing Tehran of shipping weapons for militants over the border. However, any assistance does not appear to extend to people, the paper said, reporting that, of around 25,000 suspected militants in US custody in Iraq, 11 were Iranian. No Iranians were listed among the fighters whose details were found."
I enjoy my morning walk with my dog, even though temperatures are now dipping below zero here in Montreal, and snow, hail, and wind are expected company every morning. I have been doing this since we welcomed a Golden Retriever in our family 10 years ago. I developped, through the years, some solid friendships with other dog owners whom I meet regularly every morning. These friendships are only restricted to our morning dwellings; we talk dogs, we talk Politics, sometimes, not often, and we talk books. One of these friends is an avid reader. Recently, looking for something new to read, she asked me for advice. I sent her a link to the British author, William Boyd.
I first read Boyd in late eighties when he appeared on French TV with literary host Bernard Pivot to speak about his book, 'The New Confessions'. I read the book as well as others from him. He became, with Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Ismail Kadare, one of the few authors my husband and I read compulsively.
My friend finished yesterday her first Boyd novel, 'Brazzaville beach', which happens to be one of my preferred. She is amazed at how critics and media can keep such a great author hidden from the public while the only ones we hear about in British literary circles are the usual suspects, Rushdie, Amis, and McEwan. We compared McEwan's characters to Boyd's and we found that, although McEwan writes beautifully and there is no doubt about it, his characters are dry, flat, snobbish, yes snobbish, and aloof. While Boyd's characters are full of life, raw emotions, humanity, and empathy. Boyd is also extremely funny. My friend told me that she heard Amis on TV last week, don't ask me which TV and which program, I don't watch TV, and that he was snobbish, pedantic, and shallow.
O.K. I know I am doing here gross and savage literary comparisons, but I know that lietrature has to do with identification, beside being concerned by good writing. And frankly, even though we admire McEwan's characters in Saturday, for example, and we would like to reach that stage where we stop caring about each other and we care only for ourselves, like McEwan's characters, we couldn't identify with them, I couldn't. I remember this passage from Saturday when Perowne goes to visit his mother who is sugffering from Alzheimer. This passage should have been the most poignant passage in the book. But nothing happens. The book is entirely flat, the wife's character is flat, everything is flat, except when Perowne has to fight for his ego and his survival. We are invited, and allowed to feel only when Perowne fears for his life and his comfort. perowne has no compassion for others; his mother, those who are on the streets, and yes Baxter. I mean Baxter is a pityful man and yet, McEwan succeeds in making us fear him. And the only deeply human charcater in the book, Perowne's daughter, is neutralised by being rendered vulnerable, literally deprived from her clothes and her revolt, and forced to join her father's fight for comfort and life.
As an antidote to this literature, rush and read Boyd, impregnate yourself with his humanity and the humanity of his characters, and tell me what you think. My advice to you: start with 'Brazzaville beach', then 'An Ice cream war', and probably you are going to read the whole set...Good reading, and please drop me a line if you would like to share your thoughts on this author.
I am not posting on Lebanon these days. That's because I have been immersed for the last two weeks in my memories from the civil war while answering my son's questions for a college work he is doing for his French professor on Lebanon.
This is the first time I share the painful memories of the civil war years in Lebanon with my family in such vivid details. My son wanted me to tell him the war from my perspective and intimate experience. While doing so, he and I came to realise that my first intimate experience of the Lebanese civil war was in fact the result of a little war inside my own diverse Christian community. I discovered through the process that the 1975-1990 civil war was in fact an ensemble of small wars conducted at a small and therefore much horrible, because much closer, scale, inside communities, to erase diversity and differences within the community and to radicalise positions. For the people like me, who were against the war and lived it as a terror imposed upon them by extremists from both sides, it was these little wars, all embedded in the big official war, that mattered most. I came to realise this when my son started to ask questions about the 'other war', the war he read about in the books, the war between Muslism and Christians, because my narrative was that of a war inside a small Christian community in north Lebanon.
1975. I was seventeen when the war started in my little village, I had just graduated from college and was looking forward to start university. A small detachment of the presidential guard, as many others from the Lebanese army, was released from its official duty. The president felt at the time that he would be better protected by his own militia. The head of the presidential guard came to the village with some of the guards, their weapons and tanks. They quickly allied with the local Phalanges - executioners with Sharon of the sabra and Chatila massacres, part of present day Lebanese Forces, Israel's long time friends, and March 14th main allies - who were ill equipped locally at the time, in order to fight, not Muslims, no, but progressists and pro-Palestinian forces, mainly Greek orthodox Christians, in the nearby village. The first move was a public display of the weapons in the main place in my village, and a clear message of hostility toward the neighbouring community traditionally allied to Palestinians and the Syrian Progressist Nationalist Party. The main road to our village crosses the other one. So the first effect of such hostilities was a self imposed blockade. My mother and other women in the village started to make their own bread and there was even a time when flour was scarce in the village. The community was cut from the outside world and the militia reigned in. They ruled by terrorising and killing non compliant people, unlawfully imprisoning and torturing, until they got a total control on the village occupying the houses of the people who left, enrolling young people without proper training, and imposing a local tax on villagers.
I told my son that before this there was political and ideological diversity in my village, even sometimes in the same family. After the milita took over, nobody would dare express a different political opinion. The main thinking was that Muslims fighting with Palestinians and Palestinians and their sympathisers were subhumans and deserved just to be killed. I guess it must have been the same thinking on the other side of the larger divide. My father imposed a curfew in our own house. He was afraid that my two young brothers would be enrolled in the militia. He told us not to open the door to anybody when he wasn't in the house. He made me burn my books, some of them, he suspected, could be used against him and my brothers, who were younger than me, for expressing dissenting political opinions. He told me that if there was retaliation against us, who were known as, at best, neutral, at worst, sympathisers of political progress and against the civil war, it will be against the men of the family. 'Women for them', my father told me, 'are not a worthy target'. Because at the beginning of the war, and especially in small places in Lebanon, the weaponry used was the looted old weaponry of the Lebanese army, the first impact of the war on my village was a bomb from a small caliber canon making a lot of noise and a hole in one of the village's roads. I remember the night the first bomb fell on the village. I was reading, at three O'clock in the morning, a book found in my father's library, which was probably forbidden for me, 'Lady Chatterley', in its French translation. It was quite a strong escape from the anxieties of the looming war for the seventeen year old I was. I remember my mother waking up screaming, rushing us to the bathroom to hide us there. Retrospectively, this was a dangerous place to hide in but there was nowhere we could hide. The village's houses were mostly made of one floor, no upper floor and no basement to protect from falling bombs. We would later find a safe place in my grand'parents ancestral and Ottoman era house with its meter thick walls and upper floor adorned with Qanatir. We stayed there for a while until my father decided that things were getting very ugly between people inside the village. We were to leave the village for a more civilised place. This is when my father sent us, me with my mother and my brothers, to another war area, Jounieh, to my aunt's house there. He said that we wouldn't be safe from bombs but at least, as nobody knows us there, we would be safe from psychological terror. He stayed behind in the village, to guard the house and to 'offer his services to the militia', as he said, as they have asked each family to contribute with human resources to the war effort. My father told us not to be afraid, he said that if my brothers could escape forced enrolement at their young age he was saving their souls. As for him, he was old enough not to be fooled by the ideology of terror. I remember that we stayed three months at my aunt's. My father came to visit once. We missed him.
As the Phalanges took over the village and the nearby village, tensions eased inside our village. But there was fear and mourning. Many people had left. Many wouldn't speak to each other. Many were denounced by their long time neigbours and friends. Many were killed in personal vendetta, and some disappeared without explanation (I suspect they were killed and their bodies hidden from their families somewhere).
We returned from Jounieh. I remember this precise day. I was eager to see my village again but as we crossed the nearby village that was conquered, I saw desolation, empty roads and half bodies burning on the sides. My mother had to put her hands before my eyes. There weren't many material casualties in my own village, but the damage was elsewhere. It was inside the hearts and the minds. And it was there to stay forever. I knew inside that our future and my brothers' future wasn't going to be in this country.
I think the only movie that describes best my war experience in lebanon is 'Les petites guerres' of the late Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Baghdadi. I saw the movie when it was released in France after I left Lebanon. But my own experience was much worse. This was a civil war that happened inside a small isolated community. This experience was to define me for life.
"...So when will our governments speak up? When will they acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East, and that it presents an existential threat to its neighbours? When will they admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? When will they demand that the rules they impose on Iran should also apply to Israel?"
-Most western news media presented Hamas as evil people and Fatah as nice people and attributed, in their titles, the responsibility to Hamas, despite the gap between the information in the articles to which the titles refer and the titles. Indeed, even the most damning title for Hamas from the French newspaper Liberation 'Hamas gunmen target the crowd' does not match the article in which the reporter writes that such an information was given by Fatah while Hamas affirmed that its members were provoked by Fatah. Le Monde's correspondant in Jerusalem is more cautious. Despite the title 'Hamas members shoot Fatah's who were celebrating Arafat's third anniversary death', the article tells us that the 'fighting started at the end of the gathering without known reason. Some protesters started to throw stones on members of the Hamas security who retaliated. Hamas accused Fatah of posting snipers on the roofs to shoot the members of the executive branch of Hamas.
It has been a while since the last US-sponsored, color-coded “revolution.” But that does not mean that Elliott Abrams and Condoleezza Rice have stopped trying.
Just a few days ago, several trucks made their way into the Gaza Strip with the help of Israel. On board supposedly were food supplies for the starving population. However, upon inspection the cargo turned out to be 45,000 yellow Fatah flags and an equal number of baseball caps with Fatah logo on them and kafiyyahs to complement the ensemble.
Hamas could have confiscated these supplies, since it knew what they were intended for. But it decided to let Fatah receive the implements of what was intended as a yellow color-coded mass rally against Hamas. The occasion chosen was the third anniversary of Arafat’s death.
Two observations are in order. In the past two years, when Fatah controlled the Gaza Strip, nothing comparable was organized in Arafat’s memory. The other point is that this organized rally was much larger than any rallies in the West Bank, which Abbas and his cohorts still control.
To Hamas’ credit it gave permission to hold the rally, even though Hamas is totally forbidden from holding even a rally of two dozen people in the West Bank. When Hamas supporters attempted to organize a small protest in Al-Najah University in Nablus, they were beaten up by Abbas’ thugs, some were imprisoned and many expelled from the university.
The Gaza rally almost ended peacefully as was agreed upon with the police. But this was not the plan all along. The plan was to provoke Hamas and instigate violence, and this was what happened. A few supporters of the former Fatah warlords in Gaza opened fire on some of the civilians and on the Hamas security. The idea was to create chaos and to blame the killing on the Hamas police; classic USraeli tactics. Several Hamas policemen were injured and six or seven civilians were killed.
To their credit, the English press like The Guardian and The Independant were more cautious.
Gresh concludes that both Fatah and Hamas are responsible for the deterioration of everyday life for Palestinians while Israel, the main culprit, continues to increase pressure on Gaza with defence minister, Ehud Barak, announcing on November 12th that Israel will step up an ongoing electricity blockade on Gaza.
Conclusion: With the clashes between Fatah and Hamas and sensationalist western titles about them, the news of the garotting of the Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of Israel went totally unnoticed in the media.
"This broader Middle East is an ill-defined area extending from Pakistan, through the Horn of Africa to Morocco. Since 9/11 it has become the main theatre for the deployment of US military power and the decisive, even the sole, battlefield in what the US sees as a global conflict. The region's oil resources and strategic position, and the presence of Israel, have made it a US priority, particularly since the French and British began to withdraw after 1956. As Philippe Croz-Vincent has pointed out in a subtle analysis of the "American moment", the Middle East has replaced Latin America as the US backyard (Vertiges de la puissance. Le moment américain au Moyen-Orient, La Découverte, Paris, 2007). But with a major difference: Latin America was never a crucial battlefield in a third world war."
Cartoon by Steve Bell (my preferred cartoonist) "Nicolas Sarkozy may fast make a name for himself on the world stage. Just not the one he wants Six months in office, and Nicolas Sarkozy has not ceased being an embarrassment on the world stage. From his first appearance at the G8 summit in Germany, where he foolishly called for more delay on Kosovo - a move that courtesy forced his new partners to support - to his fawning visit to Washington this week, France's president is making waves for the wrong reasons. Headstrong and unreflective, Sarkozy risks making an ass of himself."
While Nato and the Canadians are congratulating themselves on 'progress' made in Afghanistan, political activist Malalai Joya, who was recently ousted from the Afghan parliament, is denouncing US policy there. I listened to her speaking with Anna Maria Tremonti at The Current's CBC.
She is describing a reality that is hidden from us here in the West. The US, she says, is not interested by democracy in Afghanistan. The US is financing the Northern Alliance thugs against the Taliban thugs. It is supporting a corrupt government and alienating the population.
There will be more on this blog on this courageous young woman. Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali defenders, Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri Lévy, are keeping mumm about Joya and her likes. Her case is not mediatic enough for them, neither neo-con friendly enough, nor Islamophobic enough.
The difference betweenn Hirsi Ali and Joya is that Joya is telling the truth about her government and Ali has been always telling lies about Islam. The other difference is that Hirsi Ali is telling the west what it wants to hear and Joya is telling the west what it does not want to hear.
Today marks ninety years since the Balfour declaration had been issued. It is a simple letter from Lord Balfour to lord Rotschild, dated November 2, 1917, promising Jews a homeland in Palestine on which Great Britain had a mandate. Balfour had worked on the declaration with Chaim Weizmann, head of the world's zionist organisation. Great Britain, who tried to rally Arabs against Ottomans during WWI, thanks to the activities of Laurence of Arabia, was able to have on its side Faisal bin Husayn, from the Hachemite dynasty of Saudi Arabia, who later became king of Iraq, under the British mandate. It is this same Faisal who signed with Weizman, on January 3, 1919, the Weizmann-Faisal agreement accepting the Balfour declaration in exchange for kingdoms in the Arab world given to him and his sons under the British mandate.
Faisal is seen here on the right, with Weizmann dressed as an Arab for the occasion.
What surprises me is that here we are ninety years later with zionists, and some Arabs, playing exactly the same games, speaking in the name of Jews, or in the case of Saudis in the name of all Arabs, leading countries to war, for the egoistic interests of the few...It strikes me also that there must be a structural flaw to that great democracy that was the US in order to have become, over the years, so much vulnerable to lobbying, against its own interests. Absolute power and money are against a healthy democracy and those are the main flaws in the US. The zionist lobby seems to have been playing this game from the beginning but it is in the US that the game became so successful, because of the US imperial aspirations and its money fueled 'democracy'. And what game the Saudis are playing ? Preserving their own dynasty by any means.
An update from a commentator on this post on the anti-semitism of Lord Balfour and on the early and continuing collaboration between zionists and anit-semites. "The Zionists have ruthlessly exploited antisemitism to achieve their aims."
"Many European Jews who lived in Palestine from 1939 to 1945 would have offered anything to save the lives of their family members stuck in Poland and Germany who were doomed to death camps"
You need to read Ben Hecht"s book regarding Zionist collaboration witn the Nazis during WWII. He accuses the Zionist establishment of seeking young able bodied Jews for Palestine and sending others to the concentration camps in Hungary.
Zionism is the other side of the coin and can best be illustrated with a quote by its patron ,the antisemite Lord Balfour in 1918.
"For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely for this, if for no other reason, it should receive our support."
Mr. Herzl, The father of Zionism also said:
"I will say to the German Kaiser: Let us go forth. We are aliens here".
In an editorial article in "Davar", the official newspaper of the governing Israel Labour Party (Mapai). Editor Sharun wrote: "I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power, as I have the will, I would select a score of efficient young men - intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with desire to help redeem Jews - and I would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews, and plague these Jews with anti-semitic slogans, such as 'Bloody Jew,' 'Jews go to Palestine,' and similar 'intimacies.' I can vouch that the results, in terms of considerable immigration to Israel from these countries, would be ten thousand times larger than the results brought by thousands of emissaries who have been, for decades, preaching to deaf ears."(Lilienthal, Alfred; What Price Israel?, page 47)
As for the Russian Jews, many were economic refugees fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union. Refugees only had to prove that one of their grandparents was Jewish.
Jews after the collapse of the USSR rose to prominence in politics and business. The First Lady , Mrs. Yeltsin was Jewish so it is hard to argue that the emigration was the result of antisemitism."(Thanks Issam)
I was listening to the CBC radio today, morning edition of November first with host Shelagh Rogers. Around 10:40 Shelagh hosted a debate about whether the Canadian military should be given the opportunity to recruit directly in high schools, as any other employer. At one point, one of the guests mentioned that even the Israeli army was recruiting in Canadian high schools through Sar-El.
Recruiting for a foreign army is illegal in Canada. But Harper's Israel friendly government seems to be ignoring this. Moreover, as a Canadian from a Lebanese origin, I am indignated that my government permits such activities in our high schools for an army which killed a Canadian family of eight from my neighbourhood on the first day of Israel's July agression on Lebanon.
Since March 29th 2006